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Before I swing into what I really feel like bitching about right now, I just want to repeat something I’ve said in a previous post: if you’re not a tank don’t fucking tank. I’ve been wanting to write this post generally for a few hours now, but before I did I thought I’d log in my little Druid and do some dungeons to pass the time, and what did I find? A nightmare. Two actually.

Perhaps it’s just my Druid that’s bad, but I doubt that’s the case, excusing the ego. I had two groups, neither made it past the second boss before breaking, and both times the tank was not actually a tank. First group: Death Knight, level 74 so slightly over what the usual UK requires, and a bolstered HP pool, which made me feel slightly more comfortable, until the first pull. Mage dead right away, I had to blow everything except Tranquility to keep the tank up, and the Paladin ended up bubbling too. I checked the armor and spec, it was terrible. DPS gear, not a shred of defense, and not a single talent useful for tanking. And no Frost Presence either.

She changed to Frost, and it made not a shred of difference. I recall having a discussion with Sinespe about the viability of non-tanks doing the tanking job in instances, and I have to say after my experience earlier, unless you’re some legendary player who knows exactly what to do and when, you’re going to get smacked around a lot. It’s not fair on the DPS that they have to restrict their abilities to compensate for your shitty agro, and it’s not fair on the healers to have to overclock their healing just to keep you up. Yes, I enjoy a challenge when I heal, but I enjoy a challenge that might be a stray patrol or an ‘oh shit’ situation, not a challenge that is an entire instance of double damage. Anyway, I called her right there and then and said “Frost Presence does not make you a tank, if you’re not going to at least gear/spec to your role then get the fuck out and l2play”, which was immediately followed by a vote kick (not started by me, which means somebody obviously agreed with me) that passed. The Warlock in the group then said “I have a tank, gief leader”, which I did, and another Paladin joined. What was he? Ret. Ret fucking Ret. With Righteous Fury. And no Shield. Fuck.

Anyway. Second group. Paladin tank, not so much health but I didn’t mind, after seeing Katala’s tanking setup I’m used to assuming that a lower health pool usually means avoidance out of the arse. I was wrong. The tank held no agro at all even with Righteous Fury up, and every pull he’d scream “DON’T AOE I CAN’T HOLD AGRO”. Now, is it me or do Paladins have built into their rotation two perfectly good AoE abilities already? If you can’t hold agro on Blizzard or Volley then you need to step out of the fucking game for a minute and l2tank. Anyway, the first boss went down, though I pulled agro on the trash afterwards (apparently Wild Growth is too AoE for his liking too), at which point I just gave up and logged out.

So yes, perhaps me yelling at them was the wrong thing to do, but obviously these people had 80s already, else they wouldn’t have been packing Heirloom items. They should know better by now, after this many levels of shit groups and bad tanks, that if you want to be a tank you need to put some fucking effort into it. Seriously. It’s shit like this that makes me look forward to getting my Rogue to 80 so I can at least have two allies on my side:

Tricks of the Trade: because boy, bad tanks need all the agro they can get.

Vanish: speaks for itself, no corpse runs fuck yeah!

Which brings me on to my main point of interest for this post, my Rogue. After the clunky start with it, not knowing which spec has what rotation and what weapons to use (most confusing class I’ve played to date in terms of information-needed-to-be-at-least-average), I’ve finally found a comfortable position for PvE as Combat, and while the weapon set up is less than reasonable (since I need to use either Dagger/Fist or Sword/Axe, but there are no Heirloom Axes/Fists), I still manage to turn around a reasonable level of play. I’m quite looking forward to level 80 to be honest, Rogue is the first melee class I’ve played and thought “wow this is actually quite good”, though I wonder if play style at 80 is fun enough to offset the stupid wait times for dungeons and the pressure to perform on Recount in raids. Combat is fun, not as much Stealth as I’d like but Subtlety feels quite weak, and Assassination is too ability-reliant to be particularly viable at low levels, whereas in Combat I can at least mash people’s faces with auto-attacks because Imp. Slice and Dice comes in right at the top of the tree.

My Rogue is 41 now, I’m hoping to get it to 80 before the end of May, though no pressure if I don’t since it’s exam season soon and I really should be revising. To be honest I just want to use Tricks of the Trade on bad DPS to get them killed, once I’ve done it once I’ll probably quit my Rogue forever.

Speaking of class changes, I need to get back into Disc play again, I feel like my Priest is very one sided right now. Holy? Great! Disc? Rusty. l2play.

The role check is there in LFG so that, if you can fill a particular role for an instance, you queue as it. Tanks call mobs pussies and keep their aggression, DPS take them hard from behind, and Healers mop up the mess left afterwards. Simple.

Why then, is the transition to Outlands so hard to manage? I’m a Druid, and yes I’m only level 57 but I’ve cleared Hellfire Ramparts more times than I care to remember as a tank, DPS and healer across various classes. Just an hour ago I had a highly successful run with a Feral Druid tanking, nobody died, I had to use Tranquility a couple of times to mop up some tricky pulls but overall it was a complete success. This was in my Azeroth gear, with no Elixirs or even mana drinks, the healing was just that smooth.

I queue for my second group, I want to get to 60-ish just running Ramps, it’ll gear me up amazingly well for questing and it means I’ll have a bit of a head start on Hellfire Peninsula (meaning I can do less of shitty Nagrand for the sixth time in a year), and bing, group pops up in less than a minute.

It becomes immediately clear on the first pull of two plus patrol that the Warrior isn’t going to be able to hold agro over the Shaman or the Death Knight. No matter, we carry on, no deaths and no Tranquilities blown yet, so we might be okay. We get to the pack of three casters on the first corridor, and the Death Knight’s pet manages to pull two additional packs. Tranquility number one, no matter because we wiped all the same, even with two HoTs on every person and a massive Tranquility raining from the sky. The Death Knight asks if he can tank instead, and the Warrior agrees. Given that the Death Knight has been getting agro for quite a lot of the instance (or rather, as much as we’d run which was only five or six pulls), I assumed it wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

First pull, he’s in Blood Presence. I call him out on it, he says “I can tank in any presence”, then immediate drops dead despite my best heals. The Warrior picks up, we clear it fine apart from the single death. Ressed up, he switches to Frost and doesn’t say anything more, I presume out of shame but probably not. At this point I’d like to note that Death Grip is not a toy. If you want to use it, then use it properly! Which in this case it wasn’t. He death grips melee mobs, leaving casters at the back with no threat on them ready to pick on me the second a HoT lands. Why would you do that? Surely it would make more sense to Grip the caster if you need to and then have the melee come to you, that way they’re all in range and the poor Druid won’t be pulling with a single Rejuvination.

We get the first boss down with relative ease, and pull everything up to the courtyard on the upper level, where the tricky pulls are because of the patrols that run around in the three groups. Bam, immediately he aggros multiple packs because he fails at timing his Death Grip. We manage to get most of them down, I blow another Tranquility, then a pack rears up behind from one of the fleeing patrols, wipes me down (if I could have Shadowmelded I would have, but it’s never off CD because of the amount of times I’ve ripped agro on casters because the tank hasn’t even dumped a DoT on them), and proceeds to kill off the rest of the group.

On top of that whole shitty tank ordeal, the Rogue that was the highest level in the group was pulling a whopping 200 DPS. I called him out in chat, and in whisper, I even went so far as to inspect him, I have no idea what the fuck he was doing but it wasn’t DPSing. I wonder if it was just some poor guy with only one arm trying to use his mouse with his tongue and his keyboard with his foot so he can use his only free arm to masturbate with.

I’m aware that perhaps I’m a little low to be running Ramps, my heals are underwhelming but my Healing Touch can top up a 4k tank right away, my Regrowth hits for 2k immediate and my HoTs tick at 300-400 every 3 seconds, there’s absolutely no reason you should be able to take more damage than that unless you’re retarded. Oh wait.

Frost Presence doesn’t make you a tank in the same way that a Feral Druid in healing gear doesn’t make a good healer. Mix and match might have worked in the Vanilla dungeons you ran recently, where the mobs only hit for 6 damage and then apologised before bandaging you up, but this is big boy town. If you don’t have a tank spec with your mitigation talents and reasonable threat generation, then don’t come to the table and pretend you’re a tank.

People will never learn. It gets better with Wrath, I’ve found, but only just.